Two tips

[fpb]

First: an old Italian proverb. "You cannot reason with a German, but you can give orders."
Second: only argue with a liberal when they are in the right. The more they are in the wrong, the more they become obstinate and intractable.

Comments

[falco-conlon.livejournal.com]

It just seems that from what I've learned when I hear the words "early christianity" science doesn't really leap to mind...

[fpb.livejournal.com]

It sounds to me as though you have been subjected to the typical anti-Christian form of pseudo-historical education at school. I am a semi-professional, published research historian, and it took me a good twenty years to rid myself of what I had been taught, at a time when anti-Christianity was not as widespread, shameless and aggressive as it is now.

[falco-conlon.livejournal.com]

no...actually. What I learned wasn't anti-christian at all. And I know you think I was implying that early christians were all evil bigots who tried to force their belief on others. I don't even come close to thinking that.

But what we were taught was that it was really the muslims who were the first to really delve into the scientific world.

><But I really don't want to start anything.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Which is even worse bullshit. The Muslims brutally conquered a number of advanced civilizations - the Roman Empire, heir to Greek and Egyptian civilization; Buddhist Central Asia, now uniformly Muslim and backward; India - and, for a while, had a spurt of cultural growth as they synthetized the learning of these various areas. Most of the people involved in this period of cultural splendour were not Muslim, but members of the conquered nations - Christians from Syria and Egypt, Indians, Persians - and as the Muslim hold on the various territories consolidated, the effect of the original cultural synthesis (which, I insist, had been brought about by one of the most brutal episodes of military conquest in history) faded away. A typical example of what happened is the work of the great doctor and philosopher Avicenna or Ibn Sina. Ibn Sina came from Central Asia and was a child prodigy who mastered the whole medical literature not only in Arabic but in Greek before he was 18. Later in his life he synthetized his learning and his own discoveries in a five-book manual called Al Qanun or The Canon. Alas, the Muslim world became convinced that this was the last word in medical knowledge and that no further effort in research and systematization was needed; so that, far from generating a great Muslim school of medicine, the genius of Ibn Sina actually had a paralyzing effect on the Muslim mind. And why is this? Because there is a presumption in Muslim culture that Muslim culture is either perfect or able to achieve perfection, and that the only duty of the Muslim is not to perfect it but to spread it - occasionally through missionary work, more often through violent conquest. Incidentally, another "Muslim golden age" took place in India between about 1490 and 1690, in similar conditions - a Muslim minority (the Mughals) conquering a non-Muslim majority by force of arms and forcing a briefly very fertile synthesis of cultures. This was what produced such things as the Taj Mahal; and it was destroyed by another bout of Muslim intransigence - under the wretched Emperor Aurangzeb - which led to a catastrophic 25-year cycle of wars that exhausted the Mughal Empire and left India at the mercy of French and English outsiders.